


these foolish things remind me of you (they don't) (they do)

by Granspn



Category: MASH (TV)
Genre: gratuitous references to all my favorite vintage media, just experimenting with the present tense a little
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-09-12
Updated: 2020-09-12
Packaged: 2021-03-07 01:47:42
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,040
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/26418958
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Granspn/pseuds/Granspn
Summary: hawk and bj become obsessed with trying to figure out what kind of story they’re in'“I think it might be tragedy, Beej,” Hawkeye says, elbows deep in a stomach and a chest.“I just hope I’m Mercutio.”“You would leave me? Make me drag your bleeding body off stage?”“I’d have to be dead to do it.”’
Relationships: B. J. Hunnicutt/Benjamin Franklin "Hawkeye" Pierce
Comments: 9
Kudos: 52





	these foolish things remind me of you (they don't) (they do)

**Author's Note:**

> just one more contribution to the hot mash summer we’re all having rn since I started making notes of every time in the show they mention the genre they’re in or compare themselves to some characters and then added some more, and also I wrote this in like a fugue state in just a few hours so it’s.. I don’t know what it is but I’m partial to the fugue
> 
> at the end there's a rudimentary list of all the things that come up here, though also many things have probably influenced this that i didnt list, not the least of which being all the commentary and fics ive been reading lately bc ive been slowly going insane this summer in a manner not unlike the woman from the yellow wallpaper.. anyway

It starts because of _Arrowsmith._ Which is to say it starts because Hawkeye has read every book on camp about fifty times and BJ is having him read random selections from his shelf out loud to him to kill the boredom. _Arrowsmith_ has an inscription from his father on the inside cover, which he reads first.

“‘To the future Dr. Pierce from the current. Read it in good health.’”

“Cute,” BJ says.

“I thought so,” Hawkeye agrees. It starts when they’re halfway through. “‘Doctor Hesselink said: “Doctor, what’s this I hear? You’re not going away? Why, you and I were just beginning to bring medical practice in this neck of the woods up to where it ought to be, so I drove over tonight– Huh? We panned you? Ye-es, I suppose we did, but that doesn’t mean we didn’t appreciate you. Small place like here or Gronigen, you have to roast your neighbors to keep busy. Why, doctor, I’ve been watching you develop from an unlicked cub to a real upstanding physician, and now you’re going away– you don’t know how I feel–”’”

“Hey, Hawkeye?” Radar comes into the Swamp to interrupt the monologue.

“Yo.”

“Colonel Potter wants to see you.”

“Oh, right away, sire.” He dog-ears the page and tosses the book in BJ’s lap.

“See you later, Dr. Arrowsmith,” BJ says. Hawkeye laughs, and stops in the doorway.

“Me Arrowsmith? You really think I’m the protagonist of this little American parable? Besides, I’m obviously Wickett.”

BJ hums. “Okay, Terry.”

“Martin,” Hawkeye addresses BJ, and lets the door shut behind him on its own. He sees BJ again at dinner in the mess tent. He sits down across from him and lets his tray down with a satisfying clunk.

“I am _not_ Arrowsmith,” Hawkeye says.

“Okay, you’re not Arrowsmith,” BJ says, barely looking up from his barely food. “You’re still thinking about that?”

“You really think I’m him? He’s me?”

“I just said you weren’t,” BJ says, putting his fork down and giving up on dinner. 

“Only ‘cause I said so.”

“Well, you’d know better than anyone, wouldn’t you?”

“BJ, Martin doesn’t _do_ anything. Things just… _happen_ to him.”

“True,” BJ muses. “I guess you’re more of a maverick.” That just annoys Hawkeye more.

“Shut up, that’s not what I mean. Besides, Carlye is Leora, remember? If I was Arrowsmith I would have married her.”

“Fine, fine,” BJ says. “I guess you are more like Wickett, anyway. Perpetual bachelor, married to your work. It suits you. You aren’t succored by tradition or anybody’s expectations of you.” Hawkeye throws him a withering expression.

“Would you relax with that?”

“But don’t you see how that gives you, I don’t know, the energy of a protagonist? Arrowsmith is such the anti-main character. Like you said, he’s barely the leading man of his own life. Can you blame me for seeing you as the narrator here?”

“BJ, what are you talking about? Don’t you feel like the narrator of your own life?”

“You just said you don’t feel like the main character of this story.”

Hawkeye glances around the tent. “Maybe it’s an ensemble cast.”

“See, BJ? Now I know I’m not the main character,” Hawkeye says across the O.R.

“How’s that, Hawk?”

“We’re just extras. Doctors? In a war movie? No, no, this story isn’t about us.”

“It feels like it’s about us.”

“What _are_ you talking about?” Charles says from his table. Margaret looks up expectantly at Hawkeye from across his own.

“We’re just doing some soul-searching, Charles. Trying to figure out who we are.”

“I think this House of Mirth is finally cracking up,” Charles says.

“Lily Bart!” Hawkeye says, startling Margaret into nearly dropping a clamp. “Now that’s an anti-protagonist I can get into.”

“She dies at the end,” Margaret sounds concerned.

“That’s what I mean.”

“Jesus, Hawk. At least Martin and Terry have a happy ending,” BJ says. 

“Pierce?” Potter calls.

“ _Arrowsmith_ ,” Hawkeye explains.

“Oh,” Potter says, still looking confused.

“You know, that was the name of my cat when I was a resident,” Hawkeye says. “Pierce, Arrow, it’s all very clever actually.”

“Tell me when and I’ll mark my calendar,” BJ says. Clink, clunk, instruments in hands.

“Maybe we’re in a Woolf novel,” Hawkeye says in the Swamp, swishing a martini in his glass. “Stream of consciousness, a hint of homosexuality.”

“A hint?” BJ says.

“A pinch,” Hawkeye says. BJ pinches him. “Careful,” Hawkeye says, “you’ll wake me.”

“How could we be in each other’s dreams?”

“Bishop Berkeley says we’re all in God’s dream.”

“Well I think, therefore I am. And I sleep, perchance to dream.” BJ lies down in his cot, awake with his eyes closed.

“There’s the rub.”

“Aha!” BJ says, sitting upright. “Maybe it’s Shakespeare.”

“But is it comedy or tragedy?”

“Or a history?”

“Where were you at Agincourt? Where were you at Stalingrad? And where were you last night when it was your turn to fill the still?”

“Shipwrecked,” BJ says. “Maybe I’m Antonio, Sebastian.”

Hawkeye smiles like he’s planning something. “No, I think you’re Maria.”

“Sure, and Klinger can be Viola,” BJ says. “And what does that make you? Feste?”

“Absolutely. The fool is always the wisest one in the room.”

“And he frames the story. We’re back to square one, that you’re the narrator.”

“I’m unreliable.”

“That’s why we love you.” Then they hear the choppers.

“Once more unto the breach, dear friends,” Hawkeye says, and holds the door for BJ. Thirty minutes later they’re hunched over bleeding bodies, patching them back together like the world’s most desperate sewing circle.

“I think it might be tragedy, Beej,” Hawkeye says, elbows deep in a stomach and a chest.

“I just hope I’m Mercutio.”

“You would leave me? Make me drag your bleeding body off stage?” Even Margaret can’t remain unfazed at that.

“I’d have to be dead to do it,” BJ says, and they both have too much to focus on to talk any longer. Clink, clunk, instruments in hands.

“The reason Klinger’s never gonna get out,” Hawkeye tells BJ as he shadows him through his rounds, “isn’t because he’ll never get enough signatures. It’s because there’s a catch.”

“A catch?” BJ asks.

“The catch,” Hawkeye explains, “is that you have to be crazy to want to be in the army. But if you’re crazy, they have to send you home. So if you _want_ to be here, all you have to do is ask to get sent home, and they’ll discharge you. The catch is, the second you ask to get sent home, it’s obvious that you’re sane, and you have to stay.”

“That’s some catch,” BJ says.

“Right. And then they keep upping the number of rotation points so you can never leave.”

“It’s almost like they’re doing it on purpose.” Pens click, charts get signed, fluids collect and drip through IVs.

“You know, BJ, I think we might be one of the double acts of all time,” Hawkeye says in the Swamp after they pull a particularly effective number on Charles involving dehydrated eggs and hydrogen peroxide. 

“Abbott and Costello?” BJ asks. 

“Who?”

“Right.”

“What does he play?”

BJ smiles. “Let’s say you’re Groucho–”

“Obviously.”

“And Trapper’s Harpo. Does that make me Chico? I don’t play the piano.”

Hawkeye hums in consideration. Between the two of them, BJ might have to be the straight man. “Maybe you’re Zeppo.”

“I’m not sure how I feel about that.”

“Don’t want to miss _A Day at the Races_?”

“I’m more partial to the opera. But no, I don’t.” If that was a test, BJ passed. He wants to leave, but he doesn’t want to leave Hawkeye. BJ returns to his magazine while Hawkeye tries to catch a baseball in a plunger.

“Does that mean Father Mulcahy has to be Chico?”

“Maybe it’s an epic. This is a war after all,” BJ proposes. Hawkeye has his feet up on the desk in post-op and BJ is lying in a bed. Hawkeye is on duty but there’s only one patient, ready to be evac-ed in the morning.

“Nothing gets by you,” he says, which he says every time someone mentions there’s a war on. But he wonders if he is Odysseus. _No_ , he thinks _, BJ is_. Because Peg is Penelope and Hawkeye is just someone he met along the way, guiding him like Virgil did Dante. Which is how he knows for sure he is not the narrator.

“You never get epics from the perspective of a bystander,” BJ says, even though Hawkeye is the bystander and BJ is the hero.

“Maybe we’re in different stories,” Hawkeye says. He thinks maybe he and BJ don’t see the world as similarly as he once thought. The patient stirs, BJ yawns, Hawkeye tilts his chair back.

Hawkeye removes a healthy appendix. He doesn’t even feel guilty about it; he just feels numb. Then there are the casualties. BJ hardly speaks to him through the whole O.R. session. Back in the Swamp, Hawkeye collapses again. They don’t even try to drink. They just lie there.

“Tilting at windmills doesn’t get you anywhere,” BJ finally says. “It just makes you exhausted.”

“Too exhausted to deal with it when the real thing comes along?”

“Maybe not tonight. But one day. That’s the day I’m worried about.”

“What could go wrong when I’ve got you, Sancho?”

BJ looks over at him like he wants to be in awe but just feels pity. “What if one day you haven’t got me?”

But Hawkeye was like this long before he met BJ. The consequences just didn’t used to be so dire. And Hawkeye will be like this long after BJ’s gone, which is a day Hawkeye doesn’t like to think about but still spends most of his time preparing for.

“Why’d he bother to write about Don Quixote?” Hawkeye asks aloud when he’s sure BJ is asleep.

“A cautionary tale,” BJ mumbles back, because he always has an answer.

“I don’t feel like a hero,” Hawkeye says. Some people say he is one. Others say he’s a traitor. Few say anything in between. Hawkeye feels very in-between these days.

“Stupid and brave are two sides of the same coin,” BJ says. They both have their eyes closed but Hawkeye can hear when BJ shifts position.

“But I’m neither,” Hawkeye says. “I’m smart and I’m scared.”

“You’re so fucking brave, Hawkeye,” BJ says, and his breathing relaxes. Now he’s asleep.

Hawkeye’s got about three names and none of them are his. BJ barely seems to have one.He thinks if he was dying, he’d give BJ his books, the ones with the best inscriptions anyway. Hawkeye owns four copies of _Last of the Mohicans._ The one Dad gave him when he started school, the one he drove all the way to Bar Harbor to buy from the big bookstore when he thought he’d lost his, the ornate anniversary edition Carlye bought him, and the one with the beautiful illustrations that he bought from an English language bookshop in Tokyo. He doesn’t know which one he would give to BJ. He wonders if he would read it, or if he would just turn the pages and stare at Hawkeye’s name. BJ sometimes believes he’s in a story, but Hawkeye comes from the pages. He was born in a story, and he lives there still.

One time, before _Arrowsmith_ , so maybe it really starts with _Earnest_ , Frank goes on a crusade and hides all of Hawkeye’s books that he considers in some way immoral. Hawkeye turns the camp upside down, and wrestles with Frank on the floor of the Swamp after he finds them in his footlocker.

“Give me that book, Frank!”

“No! It’s filthy! And the note doesn’t even make sense!” Hawkeye’s blood runs hot, or cold, or something, but whatever it is it’s the wrong temperature.

“You read the note?”

With an unfair knee to Frank’s groin, Hawkeye finally wrests _The Importance of Being Earnest_ from him, and walks shakily out to the bench in front of the tent. BJ collects the books and deposits them on Hawkeye’s bed, and joins Hawkeye. He sits down next to him, and Hawkeye slumps down and turns to lay his head in BJ’s lap. His breathing is still very heavy. He stops clutching the book to his chest and gives it to BJ.

He turns to the inside cover and reads the note. “‘Wilde’s wit was wide, but he’s got nothing on hawks.’” BJ blinks. “He’s got nothing on _Hawk’s_ ,” BJ repeats, when he gets the double meaning. “Cute.”

Hawkeye swallows. “I thought so.”

“The handwriting… who’s this from?”

“My mom.”

“Ah,” BJ says, and Hawkeye hears him register why maybe this book in particular is important to him. “It’s nice.”

“I’m not Jack Worthing or anything, you know,” Hawkeye says. Tentatively, BJ reaches down and starts playing with his hair, stroking errant black locks back into place. Goosebumps erupt all down Hawkeye’s arms.

“No,” BJ says, “just wild.”

“Pretty wild, yeah. The wild card. The pistol.” And yes, he hates when people call him that.

“Not wild, _Wilde_. With an ‘e.’”

Hawkeye breathes deeper now. “Oh. Well, maybe both. I’m flexible.”

It’s a joke he makes every time Tolstoy or Dostoyevsky come up, War _and_ Peace _,_ Crime _and_ Punishment. With BJ of course it feels different, since he’s the one person who’s ever been able to tell precisely when he’s joking and when he’s not, when he’s talking with the cadence of a joke but telling the truth. BJ rests his hand on Hawkeye’s forehead and reads to him from the play. He does an excellent Lady Bracknall. Hawkeye nearly cries from laughter.

BJ and Hawkeye are slumped on the floor of the colonel’s office, leaning against his file cabinet. Hawkeye’s robe is damp from where BJ has been crying into it. BJ pushes himself up from Hawkeye’s shoulder and gingerly runs his fingers over the bruise on Hawkeye’s face that he put there.

“Shit,” BJ whispers.

“It’s okay,” Hawkeye says, because relatively speaking, it is.

“It’s not,” BJ says. Okay, so it’s not. Hawkeye takes BJ’s hand in his and runs his fingers over the bruised knuckles. BJ winces. Hawkeye can’t bring himself to kiss where he’s been bleeding; that’s too symbolically resonant even for him. Instead he turns over BJ’s hand and feels where he knows there will be calluses from holding the same instruments for ten, twenty, thirty hours at a time, since he has the same ones. He kisses BJ’s fingertips, and his palm, the parts of him that bring life every day. Let him remember that that is how Hawkeye thinks of him.

“It’ll be okay,” Hawkeye says.

“Okay, Cassandra,” BJ says, since he doesn’t believe him.

“You know,” Hawkeye says, picking the story, the part of himself that he’s prepared to let out tonight and make it look like it’s spilling, “the first place I ever got beat up was in the medical frat house on 113th street.”

“Good place for it,” BJ says.

“Right,” Hawkeye says. “I always try to get punched surrounded mostly by doctors, so thank you for that.”

“No trouble.”

“There was a little secondhand bookshop,” Hawkeye goes on, “on the corner there, or maybe a block downtown that seemed to be the only place in town you could get all your textbooks. Then they had this scheme where at the end of every semester they would buy back all the books they’d sold at the beginning, and sell them to next year’s students. I don’t ever think they made a single dollar in profit, but they must’ve been in business for about twenty-five years, and I made friends with the guy behind the counter. I think he fell in love with me when he found out I was named out of a book.”

“Yeah,” BJ says. “That’s when I fell in love with you.”

Hawkeye sighs and lets himself sink into the feeling of BJ against him and thinks _wouldn’t it be pretty if that weren’t a joke?_

After the joking embargo, BJ tries again to make Hawkeye talk for real.

“This whole place is a joke,” Hawkeye tells him. “I can’t stand to see a set-up get stood up. Every time we move I have to ask why we’re crossing the road.”

“You think we’re a bunch of chickens?”

“Either that or we’re trying to change a lightbulb.”

BJ sighs. For once he can’t tell how seriously or not Hawkeye is taking this.

“We do walk into a bar a lot,” BJ finally says.

“Ouch.”

BJ thinks he’s real. Hawkeye knows this is a story. He has to tell himself it is, or else it’s meaningless. (He knows it’s meaningless. It’s why he has to work so hard to give it meaning.)

“If I were the protagonist I would be able to change something. But nothing ever changes, BJ.”

“So we beat on, boats against the current, borne back ceaselessly into the past,” BJ says. “Fitzgerald says things never change. Hemingway, too.”

“Jake and Brett could have had a good life together,” Hawkeye says.

“You want Brett to just leave everything behind?”

“I don’t know,” Hawkeye says. _I don’t know if I want you to leave Peg_. “I just think they make themselves miserable.”

“So they’re not us,” BJ says. “The war is making us miserable.”

Hawkeye doesn’t know if he’d be more or less miserable if he could actually make a difference. He almost can’t believe that knowing he can’t doesn’t stop him from trying.

“All we do here is try to save lives,” he says. “I don’t see why we can’t do that from home. The lives we save here aren’t worth any more or less than the lives back there.”

“But I’m here,” BJ says, “so I need you to be here.” Of course, since without Virgil, what would have become of Dante?

And after all this time, BJ has finally admitted that he is the narrator instead of Hawkeye, that Hawkeye is here to help him along his journey and that is all, and that is something Hawkeye can just about live with. Since BJ is Dante, and Hawkeye is Virgil, and war, of course, is Hell.

**Author's Note:**

> works cited: The title comes from both the Ella Fitzgerald song as well as the comedy version of it from 1960s radio sketch show ‘I’m Sorry I’ll Read That Again’ 
> 
> Arrowsmith (Sinclair Lewis, 1925), House of Mirth (Edith Wharton, 1905), Orlando (Virginia Woolf, 1928) (is what I had in mind though it’s not referenced in particular), The Works of George Berkeley (1784), Discourse on the Method of Rightly Conducting One's Reason and of Seeking Truth in the Sciences (Rene Descartes, 1637), Hamlet (William Shakespeare, 1599), (Henry V (1599) (though I think “where were you at agincourt” is from The Young Ones lmao), Twelfth Night (1601), Romeo and Juliet (1595), Catch-22 (Jospeh Heller, 1961 - which is why it isn’t mentioned by name), A Day At the Races/A Night at the Opera (the Marx Brothers films), The Odyssey (6th c. BCE), Inferno (Dante Alighieri, 14th c.), Don Quixote (Miguel de Cervantes, 1605, 1615), Last of The Mohicans (James Fenimore Cooper, 1826) (of course), The Importance of Being Earnest (Oscar Wilde, 1895) (though the inscription is stolen from I’m Sorry I Haven’t a Clue) (he’s got nothing on gardens), The Great Gatsby (F. Scott Fitzgerald, 1925), The Sun Also Rises (Ernest Hemingway, 1926)
> 
> That bookshop is based on a real bookshop on 112th street that did that exact thing where they’d buy up all the books at the end of each year and sell them back in the fall. They’ve since gone out of business and it’s anybody’s guess why
> 
> if u want to say hi i do my mashposting @crickelwood on tumblr
> 
> anyway.. yeah!


End file.
